


The Quality of Mercy

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - World War I, Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-10
Packaged: 2018-06-07 17:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6816187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor -- what place is this? Where are we now?" The more war changes, the more it stays the same. A collection of thoughts on  what Mercy Street looks like in France in 1917.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quality of Mercy

**Author's Note:**

> Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.   
> Shovel them under and let me work—   
>  I am the grass; I cover all. 
> 
> And pile them high at Gettysburg   
> And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.   
> Shovel them under and let me work.   
> Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:   
>  What place is this?   
>  Where are we now? 
> 
> I am the grass.   
>  Let me work." 
> 
> -Grass, by Carl Sandberg, from his collection Cornhuskers, 1918.

Young women are not to be allowed to go to France. 

This is the directive from the Superintendent of Nurses, Mrs. Dora Thompson, and it will not be crossed.  For too long the heads of the young women of America have been filled with Edith Cavell and the heroic nurses of Lemnos, of their own peers driving ambulances and helping the Red Cross. For them nursing is a distant vision of lovely uniforms and starched white aprons, and handsome faces silhouetted softly against the faint light of a bedside lamp. But Nurse Thompson knows what they do not -- that nursing is hard work, harder work than some of these women have ever been asked to do in their lives, and that they will see things no young woman ought to see. 

What women go to France will come back changed -- for what has been seen cannot be unseen. Matronly women are what is required for this job, women of good character and strong will who will stand their own against untold horrors.

Nurse Mary Phinney fresh-faced and not fully thirty, will be allowed to join the Army Nurse Corps with the American Expeditionary Force because her recent widowhood makes her respectable. But no one’s heard her speak about her husband, and everyone assumes “Mr. Phinney” died somewhat tragically. For Phinney is a good Boston Irish name -- safe where Von Olnhausen is not. And that name is one she leaves on the docks of New York. (Gustave left before all of this Prussian warmongering, left even before war had even been thought of by the great powers of Europe! But still they would have mocked him -- mocked her! -- even though he was a man of science, a man of peace. Happy for him, perhaps, that he had died before all of this business with the Lusitania, this mad frenzy for German blood.) She is a volunteer without formal training above and beyond a Red Cross course, but what she lacks in experience she makes up for in determination. She arrives at L'Hotel Sud, recently owned by the Green family, not knowing what to expect.

The Greens are a family of American ex-pats making a fortune in the tourist trade just outside of Paris, catering, mainly, to aging dowagers with old money and earnest college boys trying to put a bit of European polish on their already impeccable East Coast educations. The Green girls are almost more European than they are American – they speak French fluently, dance beautifully, and think all these doughboys with their backcountry manners and Americanisms terribly quaint and out of date. Emma and Alice are true  _ belles Parisiennes _ , with beautiful frocks and every finger on the very pulse of fashion, while their brother, Jimmy, has been watching out the windows longingly as every other young man has gone off to fight and women have started shooting him dirty looks in the street – though there has been no talk of white feathers just yet.

Once the war started, however, the tourists left and the army needed big buildings. First the French took it over, and now the Americans, finally arriving en masse, are being handed responsibility for the L'Hopital de L'Hotel Sud, under the administration of Doctor Summers (hopelessly antiquated and out of date – he’s never overseen a hospital in wartime, and no one else in the Medical Department has, either) somewhat ably assisted by Doctors Hale and Foster. Hale’s a holdover from the peacetime army – a man more at home with smashed fingers and twisted ankles. He’s not an innovator – he works best by following his orders.

But Foster – Foster is new. He volunteered after war was declared – he’d been studying in Paris, and simply joined the nearest French hospital and started to work. And he worked like a dog, and he learned. Now, three years in, he’s one of the best reconstructive surgeons in the whole damn war zone – and he’d teach the Americans a thing or two, if any of them would listen. But there’s a price to be paid for working like a man possessed. Eventually too many nights spent in too many operating rooms are bound to run a man down and leave him with dreams he cannot shake, and sleepless nights he cannot run from. Whiskey helps, for a while, but when that goes…who knows what he’ll turn to next?

Emma Green is bored of pretty things. She is used to being adored, and there are no young men in the streets of Paris any more – only old men with fear in their eyes, men who were young before artillery barrage and shellfire took their youth away. There’s no romance left in simply being pretty – the nurses in their white veils and blue dresses, now, that’s where the romance lives. She’s decided that’s what she’ll do, next – she’ll cut her hair into something short and chic and persuade her dressmaker to whip something up in Croix Rouge blue (but with a little more shape, and not quite so long) and she’ll go smooth those fevered brows in her family’s hotel, and then she’ll have all those adoring faces again.

When she arrives in her chic dress, batting her eyelashes and smiling at all those brave boys, no one smiles back. In fact, no one even notices her until she hears the frantic clang of an improvised bell at the front, the rumbling chugging of motor engines pulling up to idle outside the hospital doors. The hospital springs to life, nurses and orderlies all rushing to the front, past her in her darling blue dress, out to the ambulance train and the waiting wounded.

And then they come. Walking, limping, carried on stretchers, bleeding, burnt, shattered, spilling out, deranged, insensible, raving, silent, staring. Pushing past her like she were a chair, a desk, a column holding up the ceiling. “Here, hold this.” Someone shoves a helmet into her hands, pulled from some poor boy’s head as they try to salvage what’s left of his eye. Emma takes it, wordless, stands by watching in awestruck horror as the surgeon calmly inspects the boy’s face, a mess of flesh and shattered bone, and calmly pronounces that he’ll live. The helmet is heavy in her hands, the chin strap slick with blood. She doesn’t realize this until she’s passed it nervously through her hands a few times, and pulled them away, realizing what she’s holding. 

Someone shouts at her to move, and she does, darting out of the front hall and into the nearest sideroom. They used to serve tea here, in bone china cups on little tables with lace tablecloths. China, tables, lace -- all gone now. The pretty paper her mother picked out for the walls is dingy with disuse.

“Miss?” She turns, trying not to leap back in fear as the young man in the bed nearest to her whispers out from a face that is more bandage than skin. “Would you mind...some water, miss?”

There’s a cup at his bedside, complete with straw -- she sets the helmet down at her feet, wiping her hands, unthinking, on her dress, and fills the cup, sits, carefully, on the bed next to him, situates the straw against what she hopes are his lips (were his lips?) and watches as he drains the cup dry.  “Thank you, miss.”

Emma’s never heard anyone be more grateful for a cup of water in her life. And suddenly, all she can hear are cries of “Miss, please!” and a dozen faces, peering out for help. 

Well, she’s here already, and she’s spoiled her dress. 

So she goes to work. 

(Tomorrow she’ll ask Belinda to run her up an apron -- so silly of her not to come with one.)

**Author's Note:**

> I actually started watching Mercy Street, not because it was a show about a period I enjoyed, but because I wanted to see more about the history of nursing. I know more about the World Wars than I do about the Civil War, particularly from a medical perspective, and I wanted to see what this show would do for this group of women who were not, at this point in history, really recognized yet as an integral part of the Army's medical apparatus. Six episodes later, I am now hooked -- and I still know more about World War One. So, I humbly submit this -- a series of meditations, character sketches, and drabbles on how the more wars change, the more they stay the same.
> 
> In both the Civil War and the Great War we can draw some parallels -- both were periods of incredible medical advancements, especially in anesthesiology, prosthetics, and wound care. Both were periods of change for women - in the 1860s, women's rights is just beginning to grow following the great wave of public actions of the temperance movement, while in the 1910s, the work laid by those pioneers is just beginning to blossom into votes for women and jobs outside the home. The nurses of the civil war go to their work as unpaid lady volunteers, and most have no formal training. By World War One, the Army has recognized that the nurses are a valuable asset, have considered them an official part of the army since 1899 when the Army Nurse Corps was established, but will not give them the tools needed (specifically, officers' ranks) to fully exercise their formal training.
> 
> So ladies of both eras are pioneers -- and deserve to be celebrated.


End file.
